PANAÏT ISTRATI - PORTRAIT OF A REBEL
Souvarine, Boris
One mid-October evening in 1927, three friends were dining at the Casenave Restaurant in the Rue Boissy-d'Anglas in Paris. They were Christian Rakovsky, the Soviet ambassador to France, Panait...
...All this is recorded in his book Vers l'autre flamme, and in his later writings...
...it merely deplored certain abuses and proposed certain reforms...
...Gallimard has recently republished Istrati's chief works in four volumes...
...This book expounded the broad lines of the Trotskyite thesis: against the growing and abusive authoritarianism of the bureaucracy...
...Besides, I was broke and out of a job...
...As Istrati's malaise of disenchantment increased, Kazantzakis persevered in his panegyrics of the Stalinist order—precisely as ten years later he would celebrate the Franco dictatorship in Spain...
...Three books...
...The denial failed to appear...
...Know what...
...Istrati grew disillusioned and disappointed...
...You're crazy," I replied...
...In late December Istrati went to Leningrad to spend some time with his friends the Roussakovs— as he thought, for the last time...
...I decided to let Pangt decide...
...Many of these diehards were liquidated by the secretary-general of the very party they had defended as "always right...
...Soon after his arrival Istrati had also made friends with another noted guest in Moscow, Nikos Kazantzakis, who had been invited as a pro343 claimed Communist sympathizer and "friend of the U.S.S.R...
...Istrati returned to Paris on February 15, 1929, exhausted, ill, disoriented, no longer knowing to whom or to what to devote himself: he could neither speak nor keep his silence, neither write nor abstain from writing...
...The other implicated Frenchmen categorically denied the lies extorted from Rakovsky...
...Rakovsky and Istrati left together the following day—October 15—and their paths, like their destinies, diverged shortly after their arrival in Moscow, where clamorous preparations for the commemoration of "The Great October" were in full swing...
...For the fact was that during his long sojourn that was now coming to a close, hundreds of humble working people had drawn him aside to reveal some bitter truth when they sensed that no one was watching...
...Joining a small official safari, they were duly escorted by ingenuous interpreters and hardened police spies across the Ukraine and the Caucasus...
...Istrati was not one to give in easily, and the quarrel went on...
...he fairly brimmed with enthusiasm for the revolution's radiant future...
...Naturally, the name of Trotsky's old friend Rakovsky appeared on all the manifestoes, critiques, and proposals set forth by this tendency...
...He was indignant: "That's the craziest lie I've ever heard...
...for Stalin had marshaled against them a goon squad in the classic style...
...I didn't try to dissuade him, for I knew that people learn only by experience...
...There's a summer suit waiting at the tailor's...
...At Pascal's home Istrati met several members of the Roussakov family, whose eldest daughter had married Victor Serge, and whose youngest would one day marry Pascal...
...Indeed, every time since their departure from Paris that Istrati had put a penetrating and hence indiscreet question to Rakovsky, the former Soviet bigwig had dodged it with a joke or a red herring...
...The day after his return he came to see me, and began to relate his story...
...In fact, being right means being on the party's side, because history has closed its doors on all other ways of being right...
...Precisely because he had well-known friends to whom Stalin wished to show consideration (or to seem as if he was doing so), knowing he could always order the murder of Rakovsky and others some other time...
...You bet I will," he answered...
...I left for Carqueiranne with a suitcase full of Soviet clippings...
...I no longer shared their simplistic and impoverished pseudo-Marxism in which the letter kills the spirit, but this in no way diminished my personal friendship with certain Trotskyites nor, later, my sense of solidarity with their misfortune...
...You're going to write that book...
...He listened eagerly to my news summaries...
...Bernier suggested: La Russie nue...
...Yet in the end I yielded, sensible of Panait's surrender to my main point, namely that he write his own book as the extraordinary personal story of a Communist who had lost his illusions...
...Everything that has been disclosed since then only confirms my judgment...
...strati left no stone unturned in his attempt to save this family from destruction...
...Their names figured in the public declaration made by Monzie, the only European, the only political figure in the civilized world who reacted with decency to the publication of these "confessions" (except of course for Vandervelde, whose memory I salute...
...Source: Monique Jutrin, Panait Istrati, un chardon deracine, ecrivain frangais, conteur romain, Paris, 1970...
...He accepted the title...
...Somebody hailed a taxi going downtown...
...Lenin had promised that "the struggle of parties to win power will take place peacefully within the soviets," while already Bukharin and Tomsky were declaring that "With us, one party has power, the rest are in prison...
...The focus was still "the proletariat" and the "dictatorship of the proletariat"—that is, official fictions...
...The book came out in December, after the two others...
...It was as if, motivated by some obscure temerity, he had willingly locked himself in a pillory...
...Besides, the Trotskyite opposition was still in solidarity with the regime and its principles...
...we need not praise or blame them...
...I replied...
...In the best hotel the beds are crawling with lice, and Istrati shrilly protests...
...for lice don't figure in the party dogma...
...he shouted as loud as he could, went to every competent authority, even to Kalinin, the president of the Republic, to demand justice...
...In December 1927, while the wildly euphoric Istrati was returning from the Caucasus, this congress was in session in Moscow, the unanimity of its 1,669 delegates guaranteed in advance, for Stalin, who had handpicked and trained them to accept, acclaim, and obey him...
...By the end of the month he went north again to Nizhni-Novgorod (now Gorky), then made a spellbinding trip down the Volga in a luxury steamer, visited Kazan, Samara, Saratov, and Stalingrad...
...He denies the presence of lice: "No, no, there are virtually no lice here," he insists...
...He seemed engrossed in thoughts he couldn't share with us, and only seldom did he abandon them to join our conversation...
...After you pick it up you'll go down to the Riviera and write the book...
...At that time, as I've said, I attentively followed the Soviet press: not only Pravda and Izvestia, whose last page occasionally furnished important information to which diplomats and non-Soviet journalists didn't pay the slightest heed, but also Trud, the Pravda for youth...
...As my work drew to a close I wondered what to call my press summary...
...Thus the break-up was heartrending for Panalt...
...In the end he was to explain what had befallen him in a very convincing way, in an interview with a comrade, Magdeleine Marx, published in a Parisian socialist periodical (Contre le courant, no...
...I then witnessed what Victor Hugo called "a tempest in a cranium...
...But in essence nothing distinguished it from official Soviet dogma...
...Mosquitoes everywhere...
...I followed his example, for though excommunicated and vilified, I was still considered a comrade by the factions of the Communist opposition...
...He had come to believe that fascism and communism were all of a piece and even went so far as to write that fascist terror was less "inhuman" to the degree that it did not pretend to govern in the "name of the proletariat...
...My little inn was tidy, discreet, quiet, ideal for work...
...Thus Rakovsky found himself implicated in a struggle that the general party membership did not understand, and of which the Soviet people as a whole knew even less—it was a conflict intelligible only to the initiated, of which Istrati had only a vague and indifferent notion...
...If I had intervened, however, it would have been to point out to my friend, concerning his enchanting journey down the Volga, that the majesty of that river and the beauty of its riparian countryside are the work of nature, not of Bolshevism, and that the luxury of the steamboat was a product of the old regime, retained to amuse the revolutionary parvenus with whom, despite himself, he had hobnobbed during that first stage of his visit...
...In the end his opposition faction reaffirmed its loyalty to the party, admitted its failure of discipline, and affirmed that it "had no disagreement with the party on any matter of principle...
...And he added, "These pages are sacred...
...Yet his shallow political grounding, essentially that of a roving autodidact, did not allow him to see through the cliches that the Trotskyite opposition had inculcated in him, clichés about the "class struggle" (in the absence of genuine classes or of a genuine class struggle in the U.S.S.R...
...He went so far as to enjoin the GPU to stop persecuting Trotsky and his cohorts, and to allow secret balloting in party and trade-union elections...
...Soon they returned to their exploration of the vast Russian lands, from Murmansk to Archangel...
...And then, on September 18, Istrati arrived at Astrakhan where the unhappy Rakovsky, exiled, ill, and in utter disgrace, was vegetating in a cabin in a pestilential swamp infested with mosquitoes and malaria...
...One can picture the contemptuous hilarity these letters must have inspired at GPU headquarters...
...I contend, whatever they say in Moscow and whatever he says himself, that my friend is quite incapable of treason...
...No other visitor, to my knowledge, has followed so extensive an itinerary and seen so much, or inquired so earnestly into what he saw...
...But the ex-proletarian writer was ridding himself of his obsession according to his own lights, scribbling feverishly away with as little care of the shape of his account as he had shown in his three previous books...
...Secret balloting was rejected...
...he said...
...And so at Astrakhan, where the two friends ran into each other by coincidence, Rakovsky persisted in his stereotypical conformism, denying any vexatious evidence that he might be other than totally loyal to an all-powerful, all-knowing party...
...Every evening he would read what I'd written that day, encouraging me with his words and expressive gestures...
...Stalin then ordered the execution of the last survivors of the various Communist oppositions who were still languishing and in some cases already dying in the dungeons of the Gulag...
...Bukharin was attacked for encouraging the peasants to get rich...
...These men were supposed to have been his accomplices in various fictitious crimes...
...He had seen, heard, and thought much, yet still he clung to his loyalty to "the Soviet experiment...
...The cuttings were 348 selected for their generally revelatory quality...
...He stuck to his guns and we quarreled cordially, each harping on the same themes...
...23) under the title "Panait Istrati Speaks...
...I had not tried to influence the form of Istrati's book, as both Stalinists and Trotskyites accused me of doing...
...Lost in the joy of his imminent departure, Istrati seemed unaware of the contrast between him and his traveling companion...
...At this early stage he really was at loose ends...
...At once, despite the late hour, I phoned Burê at his home...
...Fifty years later I cannot reread this letter without stupefaction: Rolland found Istrati's two pathetically naive letters "magnificent," but added that "you should not seek to have them published right now, and certainly not by Boris's or Serge's friends...
...But Istrati cherished illusions about its ultimate effect: a great deal more would have been required to unsettle a public opinion intoxicated by the unrelenting propaganda of the Communist fronts...
...He said, "You're a clown," and the squabble would have begun afresh if I hadn't had the bright idea of saying, "I've nothing to wear anyway down there but my heavy Moscow suit...
...There is also a doctoral dissertation by Mme...
...Thence Istrati went on to the Crimea where he hoped to relax a while...
...The family lived in one of those capacious 345 apartments of old St...
...He praises the public works being undertaken in the region, the same region that Istrati, in his notebook, describes as "a pestilential sewer...
...The public wants your version of the events, it recognizes your style, your verve, it doesn't want some dry dossier...
...How then to defy so categori346 cal a prohibition...
...Rakovsky was one of those who submitted in 1934, who repudiated Trotsky and were repudiated by him...
...I knew of a cheap, quiet inn at Carqueiranne, in the Var, beside the sea...
...I don't care about the trial, I care only about the appalling threat suspended over the head of a friend to 350 whom, through the good offices and the professional courage of your newspaper, I address a reminder of my loyalty...
...Thus he was snatched up by the state propaganda apparatus— was officially welcomed, feted, flattered and spoiled, and dragged to endless receptions and meetings...
...He mentioned a conversation with Bure, who was living in Moscow when Pierre Laval visited that city in 1935...
...I affirm that Rakovsky was the irreproachable servant of his country...
...Something similar had already happened to me, and I'd replied with contemptuous silence...
...I am not unaware of the slander and persecution, from both left and right, that darkened the final years of PanaTt Istrati, a man closer to Don Quixote than to Gil Blas—so kind, so generous, so sincere, so emotional, and so sensible of others' distress...
...The two Balkan writers hit it off and became inseparable traveling companions...
...Istrati was dumfounded...
...The two Rumanians—for Rakovsky (later a Soviet citizen of the Ukraine) was also a Rumanian national though a Bulgarian by birth— were to leave for Moscow the following day...
...q EDITOR'S NOTE: The last years of Istrati's life were laced with fierce polemics, expressed in letters and articles, as disenchantment with what he had observed in the U.S.S.R...
...Then, too, after their return from Athens, Istrati and Kazantzakis had no longer been perpetually escorted by the GPU...
...All this was recorded in my book...
...Granted, in 1927-28 the Soviet regime was not yet what it was to become in the 1930s...
...Istrati knew little Russian, but many Rumanians and Greeks had approached him in the southern Ukraine, where they are numerous...
...Well, politics makes strange bedfellows...
...The whole idea's preposterous...
...They simply wouldn't let me see him...
...It was not merely a matter of Rolland's stand on Vers l'autre flamme, for his very adherence to Stalinism is one of that period's great enigmas...
...In the following pages I want to set down my memories of these vanished friends, and tell the unknown story behind Istrati's three volumes about Soviet communism: the first, Vers l'autre fiamme: apres seize mois dans l'URSS...
...But don't publish them...
...They proved that Soviet praxis had betrayed the program of the October Revolution...
...And on and on it went...
...Panait of course was ready...
...The following day the argument started over...
...So much was revealed, though without hard proof, by the rare veterans of Lenin's defunct party who made it out of the Gulag during the brief thaw of the de-Stalinization period...
...He's compiled all the material now, I've paid him, and since I've got a contract with Rieder but can't write myself, I'm going to publish this dossier under my own name...
...But our endless conversations all turned upon the same subject...
...clichés about the harmfulness of the bureaucracy while the Party fiber alles is in fact the very essence of any actual Soviet state...
...I had been excluded from the Communist party and the Third International in 1925, a year after Lenin's death, on charges of nonconformism and failure to observe party discipline...
...At this Panalt grew red in the face...
...He tried to intervene in person, by phone, by telegraph, by letter...
...Even the scandalous trial of the engineers from the Shakhti coalbasin, that sinister miscarriage of justice, was taken seriously in Soviets 1929...
...The crowning infamy was perpetrated by Henri Barbusse, that whore of the Soviet machine, who wrote a nauseating apologia for Stalin...
...But by then he was no longer Rakovsky...
...Toward the end of December 1927, Istrati and Kazantzakis, eager to visit Greece for a while, wrote Stalin a letter: "We are going to Greece to proclaim our enthusiasm about what we have seen in the U.S.S.R...
...Though regarded as a dissident, Rakovsky still toes the line, now the "left" line, as his faction desires...
...which is not meant to suggest that he tried to "win over" anybody who showed up, for he knew by experience that everyone must discover the truth for himself...
...I reckoned, rather, on the effect of his natural style and sap...
...Yet in the end I refused...
...Petersburg, but nine family members were crammed into four rooms, the other six rooms being occupied by other members of the lodging cooperative...
...And why was Rakovsky not condemned to death like his codefendants Bukharin, Rykov, Yagoda, Krestinsky, and others...
...I can't, I just can't...
...I don't give a damn what you think...
...trying to force her way in, she had gone so far as to make a scene there, and to slap Papa Liubov Roussakov, one of the sweetest, kindest, and most charming persons in the world...
...His heartfelt cry, published in Le Matin (March 7, 1938) under the title "The Mad Folly of the Moscow Trials," I herewith offer, slightly abridged: I met Rakovsky over 30 years ago...
...The other two more or less vanished...
...Meanwhile Istrati had published "The Roussakov Affair" in La Nouvelle Revue Francaise (it reappeared in Vers l'autre flamme, Istrati's personal volume of our Soviet trilogy...
...I said, "You're an idiot...
...I didn't even get to see Rako when I was in Moscow, though heaven knows how hard I tried...
...During his trial Rakovsky named several names: Emile Bure, the editor-in-chief of L'Ordre, my American friend Max Eastman, and then two more Frenchmen, Louis Dreyfus and Nicolle...
...The French Communist intellectuals (Henri Barbusse et al...
...They ought to be preserved in the annals of the eternal Revolution, in its visitors' book [sic...
...In other words: don't tell the truth, the public needs to be fooled, the people need a religion, the proletariat's noggin has to be stuffed with the right ideas...
...The problem was that Istrati venerated Rolland: "I am his creature," he used to say...
...One must read the chapter he wrote on "The Roussakov Affair" to judge, as he at last came to judge, the regime that still dared call itself "Soviet...
...Still I demurred, pointing out how makeshift such a work would seem...
...The ambassador, a disciplined party militant, strictly followed the injunction not to divulge any "family secrets" to one who was not a party member, even if he was a proclaimed Communist...
...By the end of the year he was back in Moscow, dead tired and beset by a host of contradictory feelings...
...Istrati had scarcely any knowledge of Marxism nor any concern about his ignorance, for his feelings responded to the purpose of the doctrine and his instincts put him on the side of the poor, the exploited, the rebellious...
...In Athens, however, their subversive declarations excited a hostile reaction...
...In those days we lived quite near each other, each in a long alley off the Avenue des Ternes...
...against the prosperity allowed wealthy peasants, etc...
...It was a rehearsal for the exclusion of the opposition from the forthcoming Fifteenth Party Congress—for what Trotsky was to call a "new Thermidor...
...I've got the answer," he said...
...Rakovsky understood...
...I ran into him again in 1924 when he was Soviet ambassador in London, and I negotiated with him when he became Soviet ambassador in Paris...
...My friend Jean Bernier, who knew of my project, joined me for my entire stay...
...In December 1928 he spent three weeks in Kiev, where one of his books was being turned into a movie...
...I'm going to write to Robertfrance now telling him I'll do my book with two collaborators, and I'll explain why I need them...
...The answer is obvious: it was the only way for him to alert Europe and America to the fact that he had been forced to lie, that all in that hideous script was lies...
...He assumed various secondary tasks and vanished once again under obscure circumstances, not to reappear until, accused and as good as condemned, he was led into the limelight of the 1938 show trials of Bukharin and others...
...I wondered if Istrati had even read the transcript of that trial...
...For that reason I'm not going to stoop to a serious discussion of Rakovsky's absurd admissions...
...the third, La Russie nue (all Paris, Editions Rieder, 1929...
...Why had Rakovsky named the names of three Frenchmen and an American in such a way as to implicate them in his "crimes...
...I asked Victor [Serge] to put together a clipping file for me with a lot of varied information that he's mentioned to me and that I'd like to study...
...And while Istrati was sitting among the upstarts of the Bolshevik oligarchy and their complaisant guests in Red Square watching the grandiose anniversary parade, Rakovsky and some of his comrades of the opposition were being abused and manhandled as they tried to bear witness to the presence of dissident opinion in the crowd...
...Everyone must make his own way according to his own lights...
...Though he'd never have been able to join any sort of collectivity, and it would have been impossible for such an independent mind to survive Soviet regimentation, he then even hoped to emigrate to Russia...
...Despite all that he already knew, Istrati was appalled over and over again, while I for my part was unaware of the effect produced on his mind by my eloquent newspaper clippings...
...Out of nowhere appears Rakovsky, "oddly enlarged, swollen, spongy"—stricken with malaria and some other disease that cannot be cured in Astrakhan...
...Kazantzakis rejoined him in April...
...Istrati, as a well-known writer and proclaimed Communist sympathizer, had been invited to the Soviet Union to take part in the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution...
...Many of his wretched informants, attracted by his fame, wished primarily to mooch cash off him, and he willingly helped them, for since Stalin had seized power, foreign "fellow travelers" received large royalties on the Russian translations of their works...
...Is it surprising then that the politically virginal Istrati went on pinning his hopes on fairy tales...
...Here's some money, go to the Riviera and write the book...
...Istrati's dismay reached its keenest pitch when he received an incredible letter from Romain Rolland enjoining him not to publish the two letters he had written to the GPU...
...I can't go against Romain Rolland's advice...
...It composed a picture of Soviet society that refuted all the platitudes about the regime...
...I mention only what I myself have been able to read with profit...
...Istrati's Soviet stay preceded by several years the horrors of farm collectivization and the attendant cruelties of Stalin's five-year plans...
...I'll publish all three...
...Istrati came back to Russia in March of 1928...
...Istrati, generally voluble, was positively euphoric, even exalted at the thought of his longdesired pilgrimage to the Mecca of communism...
...It was plain to me, the outcome of this power struggle was what obsessed Rakovsky on that last evening we spent together...
...Istrati went to pieces...
...One day he said to me point-blank, "I've had enough of your clowning...
...As the Trotskyites themselves had affirmed at the party's congress of 1927, "We have no disagreement with the party on any matter of principle...
...I didn't particularly like it, but I couldn't find anything better...
...His interspersed exclamations and rages betrayed his hatred of injustice and his compassion for its victims...
...I read Vetehernaya Moskva, Rabotehaya Gazyeta, Byednota, Krasnaya Gazyeta, Zarya Vostoka, the Kharkov Proletarian, and at times still other newspapers...
...An aggressive party woman had been underhandedly trying to secure a room in the apartment...
...One day he suddenly jumped up, paced with great strides for a few moments back and forth, stopped short in front of me, and fixed me with a commanding look...
...I cannot conclude this memoir of Istrati without mentioning the tragic fate of our friend Rakovsky, whom Istrati last saw in exile at Astrakhan in 1928...
...There he offered an excellent explanation of his initial motivation and subsequent aboutface: "It was only during the last three months of my stay . . . that the spell was broken, that the veil was rent, that the real situation, plain to any man of good faith, was revealed to me in all its cruelty...
...In his desire to make a clean breast of the matter he was simple enough to write two successive letters to the GPU in which he repledged his loyalty to the Soviet revolution, while also requesting permission to tell the truth about the evils of the regime, with the aim of promoting its reform along the broad lines of MarxismLeninism...
...At last he gave up thinking in bogus formulas about the "dictatorship of the proletariat...
...Nothing is more important than his friendship for Trotsky and his solidarity with Trotsky's people...
...Day after day now each of us merely repeated this old refrain...
...Well...
...In an article entitled "Confessions in Moscow" I showed that everybody was lying in these show trials, which were designed to dishonor the principal leaders of Lenin's party and then to murder them...
...they even managed to visit the Solovki Islands, which had been converted into a political detention camp, without noticing anything unusual...
...At last he understood that such a case was neither local nor episodic, but rather a microcosm revealing an implacable bureaucracy ready and able to chew up innocent people...
...Enviously I listened as my two friends talked about their forthcoming trip...
...Having traveled through the Transcaucasus and made friends not only with all sorts of local notables but also, albeit in secret, with simple people who received him with their proverbial hospitality, Istrati returned to southern Russia via the Black Sea...
...Some time later I learned that L'Ordre was subsidized by the Soviet Embassy...
...Istrati's mantle was scarcely that, as I have explained in these pages...
...Rakovsky was to meet the fate of the Communist opposition that called itself "Bolshevik–Leninist," a name that failed 349 to procure it immunity from the dreadful ordeals reserved for it by Stalin...
...Nobody had opened his eyes (despite his freedom to speak privately, and in their language, with Rumanian and Greek workers...
...My memory is clear, my certainty absolute...
...That's the most cockeyed idea I've ever heard of...
...Plague, malaria, cholera," writes Istrati...
...Many others "confessed their errors" and glorified Stalin in order to reenter the All-knowing, All-powerful Party—"there is no salvation outside the Church...
...Six months after publication date I'll announce that you're the author...
...and as at that time I was carefully monitoring the Soviet press, I could always soothe him by citing facts that showed the real condition of the workers under the pretended "dictatorship of the proletariat...
...Just as he was about to leave Moscow in February Istrati heard some distressing news...
...and in truth I felt a bit giddy...
...It'll be called Soviets 1929...
...347 But on one condition, Panait: that you write the damnable thing yourself with your very own ink...
...He also had gathered many confidential personal accounts in the Moldavian Republic and in Odessa, whose most populous quarter is the Rumanian-speaking Moldavanka...
...We saw each other almost every day and spoke of nothing but his Soviet experience, of the book he was supposed to write but wasn't writing...
...Lenin's death had created a momentary power vacuum in Moscow, and the two major factions within the party leadership were wrangling for supremacy and the state's absolute power over an enormous passive population...
...His biography, by Edouard Raydon (Pandit Istrati, Vagabond de genie, Paris, 1968) and Ion Capatana's book (Pandit Istrati, ou l'Homme qui n'a adhere a rien, Soutraine-parRantigny, Oise, 1941) made short shrift of these infamies...
...But I'd like to draw attention to certain pseudoconfessions that oddly illumine this sinister melodrama...
...He was sure he had me...
...Back in Moscow in May 1928, he met and exchanged platitudes with Maxim Gorky...
...Thanks to advance billing the two were everywhere received with great aplomb: meetings and speechifying in their honor, exaltations of Soviet dostizhenya (achievements), exchanges of pledges of eternal friendship and solidarity...
...Istrati's eulogistic powers never failed, and he praised his hosts, whose largesse is proverbial, to the skies...
...Monique Jutrin (Pandit Istrati, un chardon deracine ["an uprooted thistle"], Paris, 1970), which I haven't read but about which I've heard only good things...
...Translated from the French by DAN HOFSTADTER 351...
...Shouldn't I put it to use...
...Often, all at once, he would be reminded of something in his past, perhaps in his childhood, and the temptation to tell a good anecdote or joke was always irresistible...
...I was in Le Figaro's printing shop when the dispatch relating these confessions arrived—I was writing a blow-by-blow commentary on the Moscow show trials for that newspaper, which was then under the direction of Pierre Brisson...
...Rakovsky had kept on toeing the orthodox line, unfazed even by his exclusion from the party, and did not care to speak truthfully to an amateur Communist who continued to persist in the illusions and cliches of the official ideology, precisely as if he'd seen nothing in the 11 months he had spent in the U.S.S.R...
...Echoing Lenin, Izvestia confirmed that "the dictatorship of the proletariat . . . is a power bound by no law...
...Rakovsky, usually a brilliant conversationalist, soon grew pensive, silent, at times wholly distracted...
...I'd given him a letter of introduction to my friend Pierre Pascal who'd been living in Russia for some ten years and was the finest observer of Russian life one might wish for— the best informed and the most competent in matters Soviet...
...Though continuing to bask in abstract principles that ignored the palpable realities, he had experienced so much that was contrary to the reigning theories that his mind was sorely troubled...
...Awaiting "the marvelous spring," hoping that he could leave his sickbed for the Mediterranean coast he loved, Pandit Istrati died in the early hours of the morning of April 16, 1935...
...Of course, the Stalinist hacks showered him with insults...
...In her article she entreated Istrati to return to the fold of "Marxism," the basic dogma common to Trotskyites and Stalinists alike...
...The next day Istrati was taken under the wing of the Voks (Society for Foreign Cultural Exchange), which was in fact one of the many subsidiaries of the GPU or secret police...
...he would cry...
...Trotsky had said this long before Istrati...
...On his return to France in 1929, Istrati was to tell—in his wonderfully lively way, almost panting, and often interspersing his story with exclamations and reflections naïve or shrewd, frequently contradictory and sometimes ambiguous—of his 16-month sojourn in the Soviet Union and his trek into every corner of that land (his travel book has refreshed my memory of his oral account...
...He failed to understand that these wretches, morally and physically crushed by the GPU's repressive machine, were no longer themselves...
...From these papers I culled rich and various documentation that answered precisely to PanaTt's needs...
...He did not travel alone, but was escorted all the while by zealous party hacks, sly interpreters, "tails," police spies, and informers of every kind...
...A few days later we parted...
...My impersonal press summary was entirely different, essentially a collection of undeniable facts culled from official sources...
...I had no way of knowing that ten years later he would support Hitler, who would then be Stalin's ally, just as Kazantzakis would heap praises on General Franco...
...Okay...
...Some sort of simulacrum of democracy was accepted for the party but not for the working masses...
...One morning I looked in on him and he seemed calm, radiant...
...One fine day he said, "Know what...
...The piece produced a sensation with the reading public and an outcry in the Stalinist press...
...The moral and intellectual collapse of this formerly individualist thinker who had embraced Stalinism became plain in (among other documents) a letter to Jean Guehenno where he wrote that the coauthors of the Soviet trilogy were "hiding under Istrati's mantle...
...Three books, of which two will be nothing more than dry-asdust compilations...
...And that is precisely what he did when his accomplice Hitler tore up the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and attacked the Soviet Union...
...Meanwhile the forsaken Rakovsky had rejoined his comrades of the opposition faction that called itself "BolshevikLeninist"—already a harassed minority engaged in an uncertain and soon hopeless struggle...
...The only volume of the trilogy that continued to attract attention and controversy was the first one, Vers l'autre flamme, by Istrati himself...
...They have a claim on our compassion and our understanding...
...But it is precisely this attitude that precludes all suspicion of duplicity...
...But Istrati's cruellest ordeal was his rupture with Romain Rolland, whose conduct, though hardly as low as Barbusse's, was vile and deplorable...
...But perhaps the incomprehension was not really so symmetrical, for one of the two was no dupe...
...It is not my intention here to dwell on the reception of these books, except to note the Trotskyites' unhappiness over Istrati's deviations from their doctrine...
...He believed in telling the truth, both to combat the depravity of the party-state apparatus and to hasten the triumph of justice...
...Trotsky called them capitulators and cowards...
...The party is always right...
...Fifty years later I cannot recall Panait's rather disconnected narrative word for word— always sincere, often told in images, not always coherent, at times contradictory...
...The confessions regarding certain supposed machinations conducted with Nicolle and Louis Dreyfus are utterly devoid of any point, indeed they are literally senseless...
...As for the outcry in the Stalinist press, it was particularly hate-filled, indeed saturated with personal abuse, in the true Stalinist style...
...We love you the more for having written them...
...In brief, our Pam% drawn in different directions, faithful to his old convictions yet inspired by the duty to bear witness, still thought it possible to reconcile these two needs...
...It was called "No, Istrati...
...They were Christian Rakovsky, the Soviet ambassador to France, Panait Istrati, the Rumanian who wrote in French and had been a house painter, hobo, and wandering photographer before turning storyteller and winning fame with his first novel, Kyra Kyralina, and myself...
...As for the bureaucracy, which he denounced, what was it really but the party itself, the selfsame party of which Trotsky had written, "No one questions the party's will...
...Unfortunately for her, poor Panait had no conception of what this credo was all about...
...I also expected him to realize with time that though he might comb through our clipping-files to great advantage, he could scarcely publish them raw...
...He knew nothing of the political drama in which Rakovsky was engaged, a drama already large with 342 historic tragedy, in which the recall of a Soviet ambassador from France was an almost insignificant detail...
...Other passages of Rolland's letter were utterly base...
...He was, in Emile Vandervelde's phrase, "a poor human rag...
...Finally, the new edition of the first volume of the trilogy, Vers l'autre flamme (Paris, 1980), edited by the highly competent Marcel Mermoz, who has also provided a substantial introduction, offers 15 additional documents indispensable to understanding the moral of this story...
...This sort of person was soon to be a vanishing species, but then Stalin's drastic purge of Lenin's party had only just begun...
...He knew nothing of the Soviet regime but its hostility to capitalism...
...Mounting the podium Rakovsky was snubbed like a gate-crasher amid jeers and insults, heckled at each sentence and then at each word, and finally hustled away...
...accused him of having become a fascist and loosed a campaign of vilification so violent that Romain Rolland, himself no stranger to Stalinism or polemic, noted in his Journal (July 1934—June 1935) that he had refused to join Barbusse and the others in "this public execution" of "an old friend" who had "lost his mind" (inconscient...
...But when he spoke of his social and political experiences he was serious to the point of anguish...
...And he would stride about in all directions, waving his arms like a windmill...
...I replied, "Then you'll have to draft an energetic denial for L'Ordre...
...You're batty," I replied as I recovered from my astonishment...
...The ambassador was recalled by his government because or under the pretext of having sparked a furious campaign against himself in the Paris press...
...And I had been given to understand that I should give up This article is reprinted, slightly condensed, with the permission of Boris Souvarine and Editions Champs Libre...
...I didn't read Soviets 1929 till it was out...
...They contradicted Lenin's theory about the withering away of the state and the withering away of the suppression of the police, the standing army, and the bureaucracy—also his theory of the freedom of the press...
...Panait grew restless, he too wanted to go off somewhere...
...I proved that the prosecutor, the accused, the judges, the lawyers, and the witnesses were all lying (La Vie intellectuelle, organ of the Dominicans of Juvisy, April 10, 1938...
...This fortuitous meeting between an unblemished neophyte and a decorated veteran of communism is most revealing: the two friends seemed to vie as much in doctrinal squabbles as in mutual incomprehension...
...I understood his distress and did not seek to influence him, contrary to Rolland's apprehensions...
...Soon summer was in the air, and our friends were packing to leave town...
...then he would fall back into melancholy and begin to pity the oppressed and damn their oppressors...
...Roussakov was an elderly laborer and father of six...
...For the first time and close to the centers of power, a large, legitimate opposition had developed that was criticizing the oligarchy grouped around Stalin, with Leon Trotsky its foremost spokesman...
...the second, Soviets 1929...
...At this early date there were still some party members who revealed their misgivings to Istrati, and their belief that Trotsky and his followers were the promise of a better era...
...he thundered...
...I've got a contract with Rieder and they'll publish whatever I write...
...To my great surprise, it wasn't at all the compilation of documents Panait had prepared me for, though it did contain important documents, but a text written in the first person and signed "Istrati...
...Panait had rented a large and nearly empty studio, in which he paced up and down making great expressive gestures...
...and was signed by the same Magdeleine...
...In the office of the "examining magistrate" (that is, the professional torturer) he confessed everything they told him to ("Give me anyone for 24 hours," said Beria, "and I'll make him confess he's King of England...
...344 Astrakhan, "the putrid city...
...all hope of ever returning to Russia, a land that I love and whose fate has always deeply concerned me...
...And there was the Mediterranean...
...for the restoration of democratic norms within the party...
...Panait was furious, we quarreled pointlessly some more, and finally I said, "Listen, I'll compile another dossier for you like the one you got from Victor...
...left to themselves, they could more easily contact ordinary people...
...Maybe he had, but it wouldn't have made much difference, because he wouldn't have read it very carefully: the absence of logic had never discomforted him, he just gave his temperament free run...
...But compilations aren't books...
...Though not a party member, he shared certain then popular notions about "the light from the East" simply because he detested bourgeois society—its inherent evils, its loss of moral credibility, its responsibility for the horrors and consequences of the First World War...
...Once he had written, "I suppose I've never really grown up...
...On August 1 he left for Moldavia, the pseudoautonomous Rumanian-speaking republic...
...And the valiant Istrati fought back as best he could...
...Mine, yours, and Victor's clipping file...
...It had been Rolland who, after his attempted suicide in 1921, had saved him from despair and by his protection and encouragement had made him a writer, and a famous one into the bargain...
...You really do have a taste for the farfetched, don't you...
...His personal ideology was really a humanistic anarchism, devoid of theoretical underpinnings...
...Now all the years I had devoted to monitoring the Soviet press could be put to use...
...This reaction was perfectly expressed in the Trotskyite periodical I've already mentioned, Contre le courant (no...
...Our travelers could still meet sincere Communists who gave them grounds not to despair...
...And I did have so much material...
...turned to bitterness...
...Yes, he was in Trotsky's faction in 1927, and the declarations he made in the name of loyalty to his convictions and to his friends won him only public obloquy followed by banishment...
...He had borne brilliant witness in favor of the pseudosocialist regime, and now in anguish he was wondering if he could take it all back and still be understood by his audience...
...Not a soul from the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs awaited the ambassador at the railway station...
...Neither Rakovsky nor I then were about to chill a neophyte's enthusiasm by revealing any bitter truths about a regime of which he had formed only a cursory, exalted, and optimistic notion...
...Poor PanaTt had turned into a broken record, and so had I. Fortunately he had a way of digressing, or suddenly laughing aloud...
...Pravda then ran an article by her, a tissue of lies in which she demanded the arrest of Papa Roussakov, whom she slandered in terms strong enough to suggest he deserved the death penalty...
...This man could not act basely...
Vol. 29 • July 1982 • No. 3
